1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the inventive concept relate to a forensic system, method, and program, and in particular, to a forensic system, method, and program for collecting digital document information relating to litigation.
2. Background Art
Conventionally, when a crime or a legal conflict relating to a computer such as unauthorized access or leakage of confidential information or other so-called “forensic” events occur, a means or a technique for collecting and analyzing devices, data, or electronic records required for investigation into the cause of or to otherwise clarify legal evidences thereof have been proposed.
Particularly, in civil litigation in United State of America, since such a procedure as eDiscovery is required, both a plaintiff and a defendant involved in the litigation must submit all related digital information as evidences. They also need to submit digital information recorded in computers and/or servers as evidentiary material as well.
Due to the rapid development and spreading of information technologies, most information that is being produced in today's world is being produced or otherwise replicated by computers, such that massive amounts of digital information are generated, even within the same company.
Therefore, in the preparation work of gathering evidentiary material for submission to a court of law or other party, mistakes can occur where even confidential digital information, which is not necessarily related with the litigation, is nevertheless inadvertently submitted together with the evidentiary materials, which can cause legal waiver issues and other problems.
In recent years, techniques related to forensic systems have been proposed in JP-A-2006-178521 and JP-A-2007-148731. JP-A-2006-178521 discloses a forensic system where identification of a wrongdoer can be performed efficiently by a method which allows testimony to evidentiary conservation, whereby reliability of the identification is robust against human factors.
JP-A-2007-148731 discloses a forensic system where a forensic related system performs an ex-post handling, such as identification of a criminal, in connection with a legal action or determination such as an amount of loss compensation in an information damage insurance system, which pays insurance coverage due to leakage of personal information.
However, the conventional forensic systems of JP-A-2006-178521 and JP-A-2007-148731 disclose that in the collection of digital document information related with a specific individual, they may specify accessible digital document information by the individual to collect all the information. However, due to the broader access right, a vast amount of information is eventually collected.
Further, when all the information set with an access right to the individual is collected, if the individual's position is higher within an organization, the access right tends to be set broader, so that an enormous amount of electronic documents, which are not related with the litigation and which were not actually browsed by the individual are eventually collected.
As a result, too much work and cost are required for analyzing and evaluating documents to find only the documents that are related with the individual from the vast amounts of collected information.